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Introduction

The idea of television existed long before its realization as a technology. The dream of transmitting images and sounds over great distances actually dates back to the 19th century, becoming an increasingly common aspiration of scientists and inventors in the United States, Europe, and Japan after the first telegraph line opened up the modern communication era in 1844. In this way, the coming of television was always profoundly influenced by the history and development of the electronic media that preceded it.

Television technology relies on the same basic theories of electricity that served as the foundation for the telegraph and later the telephone in 1876. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone moved well beyond the dots and dashes that Samuel Morse devised for his telegraph to relay voices and music from one point to another through distant wires. Guglielmo Marconi next used Morse code to enact the first transatlantic communication by wireless telegraphy in 1901. Thus having conveyed sound through the air on radio waves, scientists and inventors around the world subsequently turned to the next great challenge of transmitting moving images in a similar fashion.

The origins of television are sufficiently complex enough that the myth of the lone inventor never fit neatly over the sprawling web of associations that were eventually needed to bring about the birth of this revolutionary new medium of communication. Advocates from several countries have laid claim to their own “father of television” over the years—including John Logie Baird in Britain, Karl Braun in Germany, Boris Rosing in Russia, and Kenjiro Takayanagi in Japan—as well as David Sarnoff, Vladimir Zworykin, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth in the United States. The idea of television was therefore an international conception from the beginning due mainly to the ever expanding reach and influence of a growing transnational scientific community.

Still, developments in the United States were essential to television’s realization as a technology, an industry, an art form, and an institutional force. Although Britain was the first country to inaugurate regularly scheduled telecasting to the general public on Nov. 2, 1936, the United States quickly caught up because of the widespread devastation and shortages in personnel and equipment that occurred because of World War II (1939–45).

Commercial TV in the United States was initially authorized by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on July 1, 1941, but the country’s entry into World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7 of that year postponed all such activity until late in 1944 when the outcome of hostilities looked much more favorable for America and its allies. By early 1946, the United States had a mere seven surviving commercial stations and 8,000 television households, but these totals far outdistanced the comparable figures and conditions in Britain, Germany, Russia, and Japan, where TV as an industry and institution was set back for many years by the ravages of World War II.

In contrast, a postwar television boom erupted in the United States. After 1946, television integrated faster into American life than any technology before it. Television took only 10 years to reach a penetration of 35 million households, while the telephone had required 80 years, the automobile 50, and radio 25. By 1962, 90% of the country, or almost 49 million households, owned their own sets. More significantly, these family units were then keeping their TV sets turned on for more than five hours a day on average. In less than a generation, television had emerged as the centerpiece of American culture.

The year 1962 was also when the first communication satellite, Telstar 1, began transmitting television and telephone signals around the world. There was then one TV for every 20 human beings on Earth; by 2000 there was one set for every four people, with no foreseeable slowdown to the worldwide spread of television in sight. America’s television industry remains the global leader in the 21st century, but the rest of the world is quickly catching up. Over the past 80 years, television has grown from a local to a regional, to a national, to an international, and finally to a global medium. Its conceptual and technological roots reach back well into the 19th century, but television’s periodic reinvention is an ongoing process that continues unabated up through today.

Television’s Prehistory (before 1947)

Even though the idea of television long predated its appearance as a workable apparatus, the notion that a mediated technology could actually transmit motion pictures from one distant location to another gained added momentum after 1884 when Paul Nipkow received a patent from the German government for his Elektrisches Teleskop (or “electric telescope”), a name that underscored television’s indebtedness to earlier forms of electronic communication. The key to Nipkow’s design was a rotating apertured disk, reminiscent of the old optical toy, the phenakistiscope (Greek for “deceptive view”), which was invented more than 50 years earlier. This device enabled a viewer to look through a series of slots that were cut into the circumference of a turning cardboard wheel, thus creating the illusion that a sequence of mirrored pictures were actually blending together as one moving image.

Nipkow’s electric telescope was far in advance of the phenakistiscope, serving as the theoretical basis for mechanical television from that point onward. He theorized that light from a subject would pass through a spinning perforated disk on to a photoconductive cell made of selenium. The “Nipkow disk” mechanically scanned whatever was in front of it, turning the incoming light rays into electrical impulses. This electricity was then transmitted to an identically synchronized receiver disk that transformed these onrushing electrical particles back into an image of the original subject on a small picture tube. As sophisticated as this design was for its time, Nipkow’s proposal remained largely speculative since he never built a working model of the electric telescope himself.

Nipkow had nevertheless created a viable theory for the eventual development of mechanical TV, inspiring a new generation of scientists and inventors. The first recorded use of the word “television” came in a paper entitled, “Télévision au moyen de l’électricité” (“television by means of electricity”), which was written and delivered by Russian physicist Constantin Perskyi on August 25, 1900, at the International Electricity Congress in Paris, France. The first time the word “television” appeared in print was in a 1907 Scientific American article entitled, “The Problem of Television,” which featured Arthur Korn’s invention of the photo-telegraph through which this German physics professor successfully transmitted photographic images by wire from Munich to Nuremberg.

Courtesy of Malcolm Baird

Also in 1907, Russian Boris Rosing applied for a TV patent using a mechanical scanning system that incorporated the earlier discovery of another German scientist, Karl Braun, who in 1897 had found a way to transmit an electron beam or cathode ray through a vacuum tube onto a screen. Rosing worked feverishly to improve Braun’s cathode ray tube, eventually sending crude black-and-white silhouettes by mechanical television in 1911. The next major breakthrough came more than a decade later when American Charles Francis Jenkins received a patent on March 22, 1922, for a prototypical mechanical TV that relayed rudimentary wireless images by way of a new and improved scanning device. Comprised mainly of two glass prisms spinning in opposite directions, this device worked much faster and more efficiently than the old Nipkow disk. In March 1925 Scotsman John Logie Baird beat Jenkins by three months with the first public demonstration of a mechanical TV. Baird’s makeshift apparatus relied heavily on the Nipkow disk.

Soon the center of gravity in the race for television began to shift subtly away from smaller entrepreneurs, however, as corporately affiliated electrical engineers entered the fray. For example, Dr. Herbert Ives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) and Dr. Ernst F.W. Alexanderson of General Electric (GE) easily called upon much greater human and financial resources to support their efforts. Still, the long-term potential of mechanical television was limited because the mechanized parts of this particular format simply could not move fast enough to produce a clear and detailed televised image. The aspirations surrounding mechanical TV in the mid-1920s gradually hit a dead end by the early 1930s. The future belonged to electronic television and to those inventors—most notably Philo Taylor Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin—who were feverishly developing this higher form of technology.

Farnsworth first imagined how electronic television would work while growing up in a small Idaho farming community. His imagination was set free as he pored over popular scientific magazines, especially those quasi-technical reports describing the wonders of electricity and the possibility of transmitting pictures by radio. Growing up to be the next Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell was a common fantasy that Farnsworth shared with many boys his age; few of his contemporaries, though, had his extraordinary scientific aptitude along with his relentless single-minded drive to excel.

Bucking the conventional wisdom, Farnsworth began working on an all-electronic television system with a small cadre of family and friends in a makeshift Hollywood laboratory as early as 1926. He moved the operation to San Francisco in 1927 and a year later he hosted a successful demonstration of his rudimentary TV camera and receiver for the press. When news of Farnsworth’s accomplishment spread across the country, Jenkins, Baird, Alexanderson and all of the other proponents of mechanical television still believed they had each invented the best system. Nevertheless, Farnsworth also attracted the knowing curiosity of the Radio Corporation of America’s (RCA’s) then acting president, David Sarnoff, and the watchful attention of Zworykin, an electronics researcher at the Westinghouse Electric Company.

Zworykin emigrated from Russia in 1919 where he had earned a degree in electrical engineering under the tutelage of Rosing. He began working at the Westinghouse Research Laboratory in Pittsburgh the following year, became a naturalized citizen in 1924, and created working prototypes of his iconoscope (camera tube) and kinescope (picture tube) by the fall of 1925. Zworykin’s plan for an all-electronic television system fell on deaf ears at Westinghouse, however, so he eventually approached Sarnoff in 1929 about the prospects of coming to work for RCA. Sarnoff soon hired Zworykin, and the world-class industrialist and the gifted inventor set about the herculean task of creating and commercializing electronic TV by the end of the 1930s under the auspices of RCA.

Farnsworth began the decade with the most advanced all-electronic television system in the world. He invented his image dissector (camera tube) in 1927 and received a patent for it in 1930. Farnsworth’s TV camera basically scanned any scene before it with an electron gun—left to right and top to bottom—dividing the action into a stream of particles that could be transmitted and eventually reproduced as a black-and-white replica on a phosphor-coated screen. He actually unveiled the first workable all-electronic television system to the general public over a 10-day exhibition during the summer of 1934 at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. He also won a patent suit against Zworykin and RCA on June 22, 1935, which allowed him to keep control of his image dissector and five other TV-related technologies that were essential to the proper functioning of any electronic television at the time.

Less than four years later, on April 20, 1939, Sarnoff nevertheless mobilized the full resources of RCA and its subsidiary, the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), to reintroduce television to an audience of international proportions at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Sarnoff produced a coming out party of such historic magnitude that Farnsworth’s earlier achievement paled in comparison and faded quickly from public view. By the end of the 1930s and throughout the early to mid-1940s, TV technology probably revealed more of Zworykin’s imprint than anyone else’s. By then, Zworykin’s research and development had been far better funded, supported over a longer period of time by an immense corporate infrastructure, and was less impeded by outside litigation than Farnsworth’s work.

Be that as it may, no one person “fathered” television; instead many people were responsible for bringing television into being. Television as a technology is much more than a camera and a receiver; it is a process of conception, invention, commercialization, program production, and nonstop innovation. Television’s birth involved one-of-a-kind inventors and workaday engineers, far-sighted industrialists and bottom-line corporate executives, creative personnel and consumers adventurous enough to embrace this astonishing new technology and make it their own.

The Network Era (1948–75)

Everett Collection

Everett Collection

Most TV programming around the world was local prior to 1948, although the American industry was poised right away to take on a more regional profile. The overwhelming majority of television watchers in the United States during the late 1940s resided in the Eastern corridor, with as many as one in five of all viewers living in the New York metropolitan area. Journeyman entertainer Milton Berle emerged as television’s first bona fide superstar during the 1948–49 season. Berle’s NBC variety show, Texaco Star Theater (1948–53), was the top-rated program in the country between 1948 and 1951, capturing more than 70 percent of all TV viewers while it aired. What the popularity of Berle and Texaco Star Theater heralded was the comeback of vaudeville, only this time on the small screen. The trend was dubbed “vaudeo,” and it comprised nearly one-third of all prime-time programming during the early 1950s and featured such stars as Jack Benny, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Bob Hope, Groucho Marx, and Red Skelton, among others.

The next great programming cycle—the situation comedy—reflected the newly emerging postwar suburban television audience. Prior to World War II, most of the suburbs that existed in the United States were exclusive enclaves populated by upper and upper-middle class Americans. In the decade and a half after the war, millions of other middle, lower-middle, and working-class families left their urban apartments and rural homesteads and joined the nationwide suburban boom in a move that would have been unthinkable just a generation before. Television developed into the ideal medium for the nuclear family in postwar America. As the nation’s consumer culture grew, viewers looked increasingly to TV to help them negotiate the transition they were making away from the customs and values of the previous generation to a more upwardly mobile, middle-class view of themselves and the future.

The Columbia Broadcasting System’s (CBS’s) I Love Lucy (1951–57) portrayed these changes in a humorous way. Many Americans could relate to the growing affluence of the show’s main characters, Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, the birth of their first child, and their eventual move out of their downtown Manhattan apartment to a home in a nearby Connecticut suburb. Lucille Ball also represented a new kind of television superstar. Unlike vaudeo, many TV situation comedies, especially those scheduled on CBS, revolved around women performers, such as Gertrude Berg as Molly Goldberg in The Goldbergs (1949–53); Peggy Wood as the lead character in Mama (1949–57); and Gracie Allen as herself in CBS’s The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–58). After finishing third in the ratings in 1951–52, I Love Lucy was the number one show in four out of the next five years. I Love Lucy additionally set the all-time highest seasonal rating of 67 in 1952–53 (translating into an average 31 million viewers per episode), topping the previous record of 62 set by Berle’s Texaco Star Theater in 1950–51.

During most of the 1950s and ’60s, women comprised an estimated 70 percent of the daytime audience and 55 to 60 percent of those viewers watching in prime time. As a result, CBS, under the direction of William S. Paley and Frank Stanton, finally overtook NBC in the ratings for the first time in the mid-1950s by targeting women with its female stars and female-friendly male performers, such as Arthur Godfrey, Jack Benny, Art Linkletter, and Garry Moore. CBS remained TV’s top network for most of the next two decades by linking this women-centered appeal with a strategy based on mainly accessible and populist programming. For its part, NBC’s schedule during this period was more identified with the New York theatrical tradition (Broadway and vaudeville) and the emerging “Chicago school” of television production with its informal style and close, intimate camera shots that strove for an immediate and personal connection between TV performers and the viewers at home.

All in all, CBS and NBC dominated television as an industry and an institution during the Network Era. DuMont was the only pioneering television network that was not built on the back of an existing radio operation; instead, this company hoped to fund its television operation by manufacturing and selling its high-quality receivers and other electronics equipment. Faced with formidable competitors such as CBS and NBC, however, DuMont finally succumbed to market pressures and ceased telecasting on Aug. 6, 1956. In contrast, the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the traditional third network, was literally brought back from the brink of bankruptcy during the mid-1950s by a far-sighted strategic plan devised by Leonard Goldenson and his executive team. They emphasized building bridges between the network and the Hollywood film industry; scheduling alternative kinds of programming rather than competing head-to-head against CBS and NBC; and targeting an audience that was then being underserved, namely young families and their baby boomer children.

In turn, ABC adopted more of a Hollywood approach to production with such early hits as Disneyland (1954–90) and Cheyenne (1955–63), which was produced by Warner Bros. ABC was eager to increase the number of reliable studio-made genre-style programs on its schedule, and the immediate success of these filmed series in both first run and syndication soon encouraged CBS and NBC to follow suit. Hollywood overtook New York as the television production capital of the world during the 1957–58 season. By the end of the decade, nearly 75 percent of all prime-time programming was being produced on the West Coast.

Furthermore, the adult Western became the newest breakout trend on the small screen, just as it had been the staple of the theatrical film industry for years. The number of Westerns on prime time actually rose from 16 in 1957–58 to 24 in 1958–59 to a peak of 28 in 1959–60 before starting its slow descent to 22 in 1960–61. During this stretch, moreover, CBS’s Gunsmoke (1955–75) was the number one TV program in America for four straight seasons. The popularity of the adult Western during the late 1950s and early ’60s was unchallenged at the time and remains unmatched by any other television genre since.

Inspired by the country’s pioneering spirit and its Western mystique, President John F. Kennedy christened his administration the New Frontier after winning a razor-thin victory over Richard Nixon in 1960. At the time, there were almost 90 million television sets in the United States, or nearly one for every two Americans. On May 9, 1961, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission chairman, Newton Minow, delivered what turned out to be a scorching indictment of the TV industry by famously calling the current state of television a “vast wasteland.” Tragically the New Frontier was abruptly cut short on Nov. 22, 1963, with the midday assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, Texas. Television did rise to the occasion with grace and resourcefulness during the Kennedy funeral and burial as the networks provided four days of continuous commercial-free service. As a result, nearly three-quarters of the country’s nearly 190 million citizens tuned in at some point in the proceedings, confirming television’s national profile once and for all.

By and large, though, most television entertainment during the 1960s contained the usual assortment of familiar and comforting formulas, even resorting to far-out fantasies at times, before inching its way towards relevancy by the end of the decade. For example, CBS’s The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71) averaged a staggering 57 million viewers per week (or 1 out of every 3.3 Americans) between 1962 and 1964, making it the top-rated show in the nation. Despite suffering a critical drubbing, The Beverly Hillbillies presented viewers with the spectacle of watching the Clampett family live out a farcical jumbo-size version of the American dream amidst the over-consumptive splendor of Southern California. The Beverly Hillbillies turned out to be the most popular series of the decade, while also reviving the situation comedy in general, as CBS loaded its schedule with as many rural and fantasy sitcoms as it could for the rest of the 1960s, substantiating Minow’s “vast wasteland” denunciation.

Television news and public affairs programming was slow to illuminate many of the seismic developments that marked the 1960s, gradually coming into its own by its workmanlike coverage of the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the space race. Before the decade ended, a TV spectacular of epic proportions captured the imagination of audiences worldwide. The core telecast of the Apollo 11 lunar landing took place over 21 continuous hours during July 20–21, 1969. An estimated worldwide television viewership of 528 million people watched this media event, the largest audience for any TV program up to that point. The accompanying radio listenership increased the aggregate total to nearly 1 billion, providing a broadcast audience of an estimated 25 percent of the Earth’s population. The international reach and impact of the Moon landing previewed the future potential of television beyond the largely self-imposed limits that were already confining the medium in the United States and elsewhere during the waning years of the Network Era.

By the early 1970s, an evident change was occurring in entertainment programming as well. CBS’s All in the Family (1971–79) was the first continuing series to ever tackle issues such as Vietnam, racism, women’s rights, homosexuality, impotence, menopause, rape, alcoholism, and many other relevant themes. Nothing quite captured the transformation happening in network television better than the dramatic contrast between this aggressively topical situation comedy and the network’s silly and farcical hit of a decade earlier, The Beverly Hillbillies. For its part, All in the Family became the number one show in the country during 1971–72 and stayed on top for the next five seasons. Moreover, its phenomenal popularity changed the face of television by making it much easier for subsequent prime-time series to also incorporate controversial subjects into their storylines.

The popularity of CBS, NBC, and ABC would never be greater than it was in 1974–75 as their three-network oligopoly reached its peak in averaging a 93.6 percent share of the prime-time viewing audience that season. Each network was highly profitable, competing solely against one another in what was basically a closed $2.5 billion TV advertising market. Within 10 short years, though, all would be different. The strategy adopted by the broadcast networks in targeting young, urban, professional viewers with more relevant and hard-hitting shows such as All in the Family also sowed the seeds of change whereby the TV industry as a whole would eventually move well beyond its mass market model. Over the next decade, a whole host of technological, industrial, and programming innovations would usher in an era predicated on an entirely new niche-market philosophy, which essentially turned the vast majority of broadcasters into narrowcasters.

The Cable Era (1976–94)

Some 70,500,000 households, or 96.4 percent of all U.S. residences, owned television sets in 1976; by 1991 the number had risen to 93,200,000, or 98.2 percent of all residences. Moreover, the typical TV household in the United States received on average 7.2 channels in 1970; 10.2 in 1980; and 27.2 by 1990. A growing number of viewing options was an essential characteristic of television’s second age as CBS, NBC, and ABC’s oligopoly was broken by the rise of cable and satellite TV.

Home Box Office, Inc. (HBO), was based on a different economic model than the one followed by the three broadcast networks. Unlike the advertiser-supported system, HBO’s subscriber format allowed the channel to concentrate all of its attention on satisfying and retaining viewers. HBO launched its satellite-cable service by accessing RCA’s Satcom 1 on Oct. 1, 1975. Its initial satellite-fed telecast was the legendary heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier known as the “Thrilla in Manila.” The telecast established HBO as a national network, and HBO began its first full year of regularly scheduled satellite-delivered programming in 1976.

C-SPAN Community (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Other basic and premium cable networks soon followed. Ted Turner took WTBS national via Satcom 1 in December 1976. The Chicago-based Tribune Company similarly converted WGN into a superstation in October 1978. Another movie channel, Showtime, which was established by Viacom in July 1976, began satellite transmission in 1978. Numerous niche channels came into being during the late 1970s and early ’80s, including CBN (the Christian Broadcasting Network) in 1977; ESPN (Entertainment and Sports Programming Network) and C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) in 1979; CNN (Cable News Network) and BET (Black Entertainment Television) in 1980; MTV (Music Television) in 1981; and The Weather Channel in 1982.

By the mid-1980s, the Cable Era was in full swing, providing all sorts of new competition for CBS, NBC, and ABC. Independent stations were given an unexpected lift by cable. Prior to the 1962 All-Channel Receiver Act, most TVs in the United States and elsewhere lacked the ability to access the UHF band (channels 14 to 83), which is where the vast majority of independent stations resided at the time. This bill required U.S. set manufacturers to include UHF as well as VHF (channels 2 to 13) tuners in all future TV receivers beginning in mid-1964. This legislation began the process, but with the growth of cable, independents flourished as a kind of broadcast/cable hybrid throughout the 1980s and into the early ’90s, when the prime-time share for these stations plateaued at around 20 percent of all available viewers.

More importantly, Fox debuted as a viable fourth broadcast network on Oct. 9, 1986. Establishing another nationwide competitor for CBS, NBC, and ABC had been attempted several times before with DuMont in the 1950s, United Network in the 1960s, Paramount in the 1970s, and Metromedia in the early 1980s. All the pieces finally fell into place in 1985, however, when Rupert Murdoch purchased both a majority share of the financially troubled Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation and the highly successful Metromedia chain of six major-market independent TV stations, providing his News Corporation with the necessary infrastructure to launch a fourth network. By the early 1990s, Fox had created a younger, edgier, and more multicultural identity than the other three broadcast networks with signature shows such as Married . . . with Children (1987–97), The Simpsons (1989– ), and In Living Color (1990–94). Fox was clearly here to stay, turning a profit for the first time in 1991.

Everett Collection

Program innovation during the Cable Era came from an unlikely source—the soap opera—which had been a staple of daytime television since the early 1950s, growing more relevant and realistic through the following decades to keep pace with its audience. The stage was thus set for its prime-time emergence with CBS’s Dallas (1978–91), which featured a serial narrative and larger-than-life characters who regularly indulged in power grabbing, scandal, and sexual intrigue. From 1980 through 1985, Dallas was either the top- or second-rated show in the country, averaging between 43 and 53 million viewers a week for five straight seasons and setting the then-record 53.3 rating and 76 share (90 million viewers) for the conclusion to the “Who Shot J.R.?” cliffhanger episode on Nov. 21, 1980. Moreover, the success of Dallas’s soap opera formula inspired the creation of even more daring and inventive serial hybrids such as NBC’s Hill Street Blues (1981–87), St. Elsewhere (1982–88), and L.A. Law (1986–94) as well as ABC’s Moonlighting (1985–89) and thirtysomething (1987–91).

Most significantly, Dallas also became an international phenomenon, attracting viewers in more than 90 countries. French Minister of Culture Jack Lang even went so far as to publicly single out Dallas in 1982 as an example of U.S. cultural “imperialism” and as a threat to the integrity of European culture. European audiences and their counterparts in North and South America, Australia, Asia, and Africa, nevertheless favored American programming to such a degree that—depending on the year—anywhere between 30 to 55 percent of advertiser-supported revenues for U.S. TV shows came from international markets during the Cable Era.

The success of Dallas was just the beginning. Soon The Cosby Show (1984–92) surfaced as the most popular program on the planet. The show sat atop the Nielsen rankings for four straight seasons from 1985 to 1989 before finally sharing the top spot with ABC’s Roseanne (1988–97) in 1989–90. The Cosby Show, which presented the lead characters of Cliff and Clair Huxtable as the ideal professional couple and all members of their large, African American family as happy, healthy, and well adjusted, had genuine cross-cultural appeal, bridging yuppie with more conservative family values and avoiding racial stereotypes. At its peak between 1985 and 1987, The Cosby Show averaged between 58 and 63 million viewers per week.

By the early 1990s, the rise of cable television and the decline of the traditional broadcast networks was an irreversible trend. Cable penetration in the United States jumped from 42.8 percent in 1985 to 60.6 percent in 1991. For most Americans the entire TV viewing experience was changing. The videocassette recorder (VCR) offered time-shifting capability to most television watchers. While only 1.1 percent of TV households in the United States had VCRs in 1980, this number had soared to 71.9 percent by 1991. Along with the VCR (and other new mediated technologies such as videodisc players and video games) came remote control keypads. These small, handheld devices, first introduced in the mid-1950s, did not become commonplace until the widespread adoption of cable and VCRs during the 1980s.

By 1991, 37 percent of all domestic viewers admitted that they preferred channel surfing (or quickly flipping through the 33.2 channels they then received on average) than just turning their television sets on to watch one specific program. Consumers at home were slowly becoming more proactive in their TV viewing behavior, while their adoption of these new television-related accessories aided in the industry’s wholesale transition from broadcasting to narrowcasting.

Nothing illustrated this transformation better than the arrival of People Meters during the mid-1980s, providing a new level of precision to the way TV audiences were measured. Nielsen’s television audimeter was first introduced in 1973. It automatically calculated which channel was being watched but not much else. People Meters added a remote control keypad to the system. These remotes were programmed ahead of time to correspond to the demographic characteristics of individual household members (including their age, sex, race, educational level, and annual income). Participants were subsequently asked to punch in and out as they watched TV. This action recorded who exactly was viewing which programs and when.

During the Cable Era, a niche-market model supplanted the old way of doing business for a television industry that had become international in scope. The shift from broadcasting to narrowcasting marked the steep decline in the three-network oligopoly that at one time had been invincible but—in the face of 106 new cable channels and nearly 300 independent stations, as well as a viable fourth broadcast network—had eroded by 1994.

The Digital Era (1995–)

The focus of television in the Digital Era was built around one overriding design principle—synergy—which industry insiders recognized as the most efficient way of capitalizing on the growing tendency toward ever greater audience fragmentation. With a wave of corporate megamergers that included Westinghouse’s $5.4 billion acquisition of CBS in 1995 and the Walt Disney Company’s $19 billion takeover of Capital Cities/ABC in 1996, media conglomerates became unprecedentedly large, and they attempted to maximize their presence across as many distribution channels as possible. Consequently, television networks in general evolved into being content providers, above all else, with their programming adapted to as many platforms as possible (television, video, the Internet, audio, and print) in order to generate multiple revenue streams for the umbrella corporation. Narrowcasting and audience segmentation were thus pushed to their logical extremes. In other words, they were given added precision with a bottom-up approach in which targeted audience segments were grouped together by clustering them according to a sophisticated array of relevant demographic, psychological, and lifestyle characteristics.

The passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 encouraged the trends toward a greater consolidation of ownership across the various mass media and the convergence of technology and content resulting from the emerging digital revolution. The FCC subsequently approved standards for digital TV broadcasting in the United States, paving the way for TV stations to begin broadcasting programs digitally in parallel with their conventional analog broadcasts. The FCC’s plan called for analog transmissions eventually to cease altogether and for stations to broadcast solely in digital. Governments around the world similarly began preparing for an all-digital future. Digital systems, by converting TV signals into binary code—the same code of 0s and 1s used in computers—offered numerous advantages over analog broadcasts. Digital TV provided sharper, clearer pictures and sound with little interference or other imperfections and had the potential to merge TV functions with those of computers. Television’s digital reincarnation ultimately evolved to a point where TV consumption became more personable, adaptable, portable, and widespread than at any time in the medium’s history.

During the first decade of the Digital Era, American audiences were watching more TV than ever before. According to Nielsen Media Research, the typical television household in the United States had its set turned on for seven hours and 15 minutes a day on average in 1995; seven hours and 39 minutes a day in 2000; and a whopping eight hours and 11 minutes a day by 2005. Moreover, the number of available channels per household shot up from 43 in 1997 to 96.4 in 2005.

Furthermore, television channels pursued ever smaller niche audiences. American viewers flipping through their channel lineups began to see networks based on traditional story forms (The Biography Channel, The History Channel) or narrative genres that were previously popular on radio and in the movies (SOAPnet, Encore Westerns, Sci Fi Channel). There were even channels aimed at offering helpful advice about lifestyle choices and activities (Home & Garden Television, Food Network).

Networks promoted their brand identities to viewers all year long and catered around the clock to consumer needs across a wide array of programming that began on television but also extended throughout a variety of related media platforms, usually publicized most aggressively on network Web sites. Branding—which refers to the defining and reinforcing of a network’s identity—became an increasingly important strategy as the TV environment grew ever more cluttered with literally dozens of marginal channels. In the early 21st century, global branding emerged as the normative strategy for the most successful television networks, with the top channels establishing a reach that traveled well beyond their national borders. For instance, MTV had 45 different channels worldwide by the mid-2000s, while CNN had 22.

The Digital Era actually started the same way as the Cable Era ended with television entertainment around the globe being largely dominated by American-made products. For example, Baywatch (1989–2001) was the most-watched program in the world during the mid-to-late 1990s, attracting hundreds of millions of viewers in more than 130 countries. A transition then took hold with the adoption of the more customized, personal-usage market model of the Digital Era whereby local television industries in countries outside of the United States developed to a point where they began franchising TV formats rather than just importing additional American programs. In this way, many programming innovations originated internationally, such as Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, a British TV quiz show whose U.S. version (1999– ) became a wildly popular hit for ABC, and the reality show Expedition: Robinson, which first appeared on Swedish TV in 1997 before it was adapted three years later by CBS as Survivor (2000– ).

Television (like the Internet) is now global in context and cultural reach. Sesame Street (1969– ), for example, has been adapted into more than 30 international versions that are televised regularly in some 120 countries. The millennium celebration on Jan. 1, 2000, was a worldwide television event with an international audience exceeding one billion people. This transnational telecast was both lavish and skillfully choreographed with a series of magnificent fireworks displays coming one after the other in quick succession from such illustrious locations as the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and Times Square in New York City. People of all ages, races, and ethnicities appeared on TV to celebrate the dream of a harmonious world and to send out wishes for a peaceful and happy new year.

In the short term, however, the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that left nearly 3,000 people dead at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan, the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and a field in rural Pennsylvania were a far more accurate harbinger of things to come. The initial shock of the attacks sent stunning reverberations around the globe as countless numbers of people simply sat glued to their television sets, struggling to make sense of the horrific images they were seeing. TV coverage of the attacks and their aftermath was continuous for several days as television transformed the events surrounding September 11 into a global media event by taking what were essentially localized catastrophes and telecasting them for the whole world to witness.

John Macdougall—AFP/Getty Images

Overall, the Digital Era has both reinvented and reinvigorated the television industry, which worldwide totaled more than $100 billion in revenues annually throughout the early 2000s. Digital convergence has enhanced and extended television’s relevancy, influence, and profitability across multiple platforms, including traditional TV sets, DVDs, the Internet, MP3 video players, stand-alone and portable digital video recorders, and mobile phones. Beside time-shifting, audiences also place-shift today by watching television on an ever-growing assortment of portable devices. The technical infrastructure underpinning the personal-usage market structure is securely in place as the process of switching to all-digital television broadcasting continues around the world.

Gary R. Edgerton

Additional Reading

Abramson, Albert. Zworykin, Pioneer of Television (University of Illinois Press, 1995).Castleman, Harry, and Walter J. Podrazik. Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television, 2nd ed. (Syracuse University Press, 2003).Edgerton, Gary R.The Columbia History of American Television (Columbia University Press, 2007).Fisher, David E. and Marshall John Fisher. Tube: The Invention of Television (Harvest, 1996).Godfrey, Donald G.Philo T. Farnsworth: The Father of Television (University of Utah Press, 2001).Kisseloff, Jeff. The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920–1961 (Penguin, 1995).MacDonald, J. Fred.One Nation Under Television: The Rise and Decline of Network TV (Nelson-Hall, 1994).Smith, Anthony, ed.Television: An International History, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 1998).Sterling, Christopher H. and John M. Kitross. Stay Tuned: A History of American Broadcasting, 3rd. ed. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002).Watson, Mary Ann. Defining Visions: Television and the American Experience in the 20th Century, 2nd ed. (Wiley-Blackwell, 2008).

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